How to start a successful business in health care at Health 2.0 conference

Great piles of cash are descending on entrepreneurs who develop health care apps, but that doesn’t make it any easier to create a useful one that your audience will adopt. Furthermore, lowered costs and streamlined application development technique let you fashion a working prototype faster than ever, but that also reduces the time you can fumble around looking for a business model. These were some of the insights I got at Spring Fling 2012: Matchpoint Boston, put on by Health 2.0 this week.

This conference was a bit of a grab-bag, including one-on-one meetings between entrepreneurs and their potential funders and customers, keynotes and panels by health care experts, round-table discussions among peers, and lightning-talk demos. I think the hallway track was the most potent part of this conference, and it was probably planned that way. The variety at the conference mirrors the work of Health 2.0 itself, which includes local chapters, challenges, an influential blog, and partnerships with a range of organizations. Overall, I appreciated the chance to get a snapshot of a critical industry searching for ways to make a positive difference in the world while capitalizing on ways to cut down on the blatant waste and mismanagement that bedevil the multi-trillion-dollar health care field.

Let’s look, for instance, at the benefits of faster development time. Health IT companies go through fairly standard early stages (idea, prototype, incubator, venture capital funding) but cochairs Indu Subaiya and Matthew Holt showed slides demonstrating that modern techniques can leave companies in the red for less time and accelerate earnings. On the other hand, Jonathan Bush of athenahealth gave a keynote listing bits of advice for company founders and admitting that his own company had made significant errors that required time to recover from. Does the fast pace of modern development leave less room for company heads to make the inevitable mistakes?

I also heard Margaret Laws, director of the California HealthCare Foundation’s Innovations Fund, warn that most of the current applications being developed for health care aim to salve common concerns among doctors or patients but don’t address what she calls the “crisis points” in health care. Brad Fluegel of Health Evolution Partners observed that, with the flood of new entrepreneurs in health IT, a lot of old ideas are being recycled without adequate attention to why they failed before.

I’m afraid this blog is coming out too negative, focusing on the dour and the dire, but I do believe that health IT needs to acknowledge its risks in order to avoid squandering the money and attention it’s getting, and on the positive side to reap the benefits of this incredibly fertile moment of possibilities in health care. Truly, there’s a lot to celebrate in health IT as well. Here are some of the fascinating start-ups I saw at the show:

hellohealth aims at that vast area of health care planning and administration that cries out for efficiency improvements–the area where we could do the most good by cutting costs without cutting back on effective patient care. Presenter Shahid Shah described the company as the intersection of patient management with revenue cycle management. They plan to help physicians manage appointments and follow-ups better, and rationalize the whole patient experience.

hellohealth will offer portals for patients as well. They’re unique, so far as I know, in charging patients for certain features.

Corey Booker demo’d onPulse, which aims to bring together doctors with groups of patients, and patients with groups of the doctors treating them. For instance, when a doctor finds an online article of interest to diabetics, she can share it with all the patients in her practice suffering from diabetes. onPulse also makes it easier for a doctor to draw in others who are treating the same patient. The information built up about their interactions can be preserved for billing.

Head of onPulse presents demo.

onPulse overlaps in several respects with HealthTap, a doctor-patient site that I’ve covered several times and for which an onPulse staffer expressed admiration. But HealthTap leaves discussions out in the open, whereas onPulse connects doctors and patients in private.

HealthPasskey.com is another one of these patient/doctor services with a patient portal. It allows doctors to upload continuity of care documents in the standard CCD format to the patient’s site, and supports various services such as making appointments.

A couple weeks ago I reported a controversy over hospitals’ claims that they couldn’t share patient records with the patients. Check out the innovative services I’ve just highlighted here as a context for judging whether the technical and legal challenges for hospitals are really too daunting. I recognize that each of the sites I’ve described pick off particular pieces of the EHR problem and that opening up the whole kit and kaboodle is a larger task, but these sites still prove that all the capabilities are in place for institutions willing to exploit them.

GlobalMed has recently released a suitcase-sized box that contains all the tools required to do a standard medical exam. This allows traveling nurse practitioners or other licensed personnel to do a quick check-up at a patient’s location without requiring a doctor or a trip to the clinic. Images can also be taken. Everything gets uploaded to a site where a doctor can do an assessment and mark up records later. The suitcase weighs about 30 pounds, rolls on wheels, and costs about $30,000 (price to come down if they start manufacturing in high quantities).

SwipeSense won Health 2.0’s 100 Day Innovation Challenge. They make a simple device that hospital staff can wear on their belts and wipe their hands on. This may not be as good as washing your hands, but takes advantage of people’s natural behavior and reduces the chance of infections. It also picks up when someone is using the device and creates reports about compliance. SwipeSense is being tested at the Rush University Medical Center.

Thryve, one of several apps that helps you track your food intake and make better choices, won the highest audience approval at Thursday’s Launch! demos.

Winner of last weekend’s developer challenge was No Sleep Kills, an app that aims to reduce accidents related to sleep deprivation (I need a corresponding app to guard against errors from sleep-deprived blogging). You can enter information on your recent sleep patterns and get back a warning not to drive.

It’s worth noting that the last item in that list, No Sleep Kills, draws information from Health and Human Services’s Healthy People site. This raises the final issue I want to bring up in regard to the Spring Fling. Sophisticated developers know their work depends heavily on data about public health and on groups of patients. HHS has actually just released another major trove of public health statistics. Our collective knowledge of who needs help, what works, and who best delivers the care would be immensely enhanced if doctors and institutions who currently guard their data would be willing to open it up in aggregate, non-identifiable form. I recently promoted this ideal in coverage of Sage Congress.

In the entirely laudable drive to monetize improvements in health care, I would like the health IT field to choose solutions that open up data rather than keep it proprietary. One of the biggest problems with health care, in this age of big data and incredibly sophisticated statistical tools, is our tragedy of the anti-commons where each institution seeks to gain competitive advantage through hoarding its data. They don’t necessarily use their own data in socially beneficial ways, either (they’re more interested in ratcheting up opportunities for marketing expensive care). We need collective sources of data in order to make the most of innovation.

OSCON 2012 Healthcare Track — The conjunction of open source and open data with health technology promises to improve creaking infrastructure and give greater control and engagement to patients. Learn more at OSCON 2012, being held July 16-20 in Portland, Oregon.